


the inventors wife

by Imwiththelycanthropes



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, F/M, Inventing things, Inventors, Original Characters - Freeform, Short Stories, i don't even know what this is, suicide TW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27482410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imwiththelycanthropes/pseuds/Imwiththelycanthropes
Summary: My husband is an inventor. He spends every waking second, which is most seconds, writing out new ideas on any paper he can find. He dances around the basement, filled ceiling to floor with his work. He only drinks black coffee and never turns his music off. Our house is always happy and full of light. Most mornings I wake up to him sitting cross-legged beside me, the morning light flooding all around him as he stares down at me. He’s always waiting to tell me his next big idea, always with the excitement of a child.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a little short story I couldn't get out of my mind based on a dream I had about two people living on a cloud. I just wanted to post it somewhere in case someone else wanted to read it. *le shrug*  
> You can check out my tumblr if you're into angst and Naruto shit: tacopathic.tumblr.com

My husband is an inventor. He spends every waking second, which is most seconds, writing out new ideas on any paper he can find. He dances around the basement, filled ceiling to floor with his work. He only drinks black coffee and never turns his music off. Our house is always happy and full of light. Most mornings I wake up to him sitting cross-legged beside me, the morning light flooding all around him as he stares down at me. He’s always waiting to tell me his next big idea, always with the excitement of a child. His hands are always rough and covered in bandaids from using them to shape and create his ideas. Most nights he spends on the roof, staring up in the sky in silence. The only sound for hours is light piano music floating out of the window and up to meet him in the stars. My husband loves the sky more than anything else in this world. Probably more than he loves me. He stares out the windows up at the clouds, whispering new ideas to himself. Sometimes I climb on the roof so he can whisper his ideas to me. Every room in the house is covered in papers and notes, diagrams, small doodles. He once left a diagram in the freezer because he wanted to keep the idea fresh. People always ask to meet my husband, my other half, and I always make excuses that he’s too busy. Which in it’s own way is true, and it’s much nicer to say that rather than ‘Oh I’m sorry my husband hates all people so he doesn’t want to meet you….’ People are usually confused by his lack of physical appearance in my life because most of the words out of my mouth are about him. My words of him could never paint the full picture of him. I love my husband, but no one would ever understand him like I do.  
My husband is an inventor. Therefore, he forgets to eat and bathe and take care of himself at the most basic of needs. I once left him for 2 days and returned to find him sitting up on the roof in broad daylight, asking when I had left. At night before I go to bed I comb my fingers through his thick brown hair, just to make sure there’s no tangles or dirt. I kiss his lips to make sure they aren’t dry and cracking. I am sometimes his worst enemy because I force him to put his work down and eat. I can handle being his worst enemy to keep him alive. People often wonder why I stay with an inventor who has never fully made nor sold an invention. I do not like those people. My husband asked me that question himself once when he was full of whiskey and we were laying on the roof looking at the stars together. One moment we were laughing and pointing at which star we would want to live on and what that life would look like, the next he was frowning looking down at me from where I laid, my head on his leg. ‘Why do you love me?’ I had laughed. To me this question was so ridiculous that was the only way to answer it. He looked cross and drank more, silent. I thought for a second before I told him, ‘I love you because you are you and I am me and that’s how it should be.’ I took the bottle from his hand and took my own swig just so he wouldn’t. ‘I believe I was made to love you and you were made to change things.’ the side of his lip twitched up just enough to relax me and we went back to looking at the stars.  
My husband is an inventor. I don’t always understand him but I usually don’t have to. Today he threw all his papers away from the kitchen table while I was sitting on the counter drinking my coffee. There was a breeze coming through the window over the sink. The sun was kissing the earth for the first time that day. I was wearing only his favorite shirt, he always liked that I put on his shirt after we had sex that night. My hands were cupped around the hot cup and I stared out at the mountains and trees. The breeze blew the steam coming from it, spinning it all around into the air until it disappeared. It was a quiet morning. He didn’t look at me as I slide off the counter, demanding he tell me what he was doing. He just kept his eyes trained on the trash can as he slid all his work, his dreams, his paintings and ideas into the trash. ‘I said what are you doing?’ I hold my hand over his, stopping the next pile from sliding off the table. He didn’t respond. ‘These are your dreams, your ideas, your stories- your life!’ I yell the last part harsher than I meant. I do that sometimes, let some things come out angrier than they should when they build up inside me. I try to hold these words in but they always push themselves out. My husband says I care too fully about things. He never responds to it well. He told me once it was like I’m accusing him of something but he doesn’t usually know what of. He turns his head away from me, muttering something. ‘What did you say?’ I demand. He jerks his hand out from under mine, taking the pile of coffee spilled, smudged ink, love-filled papers with him and calmly throws them into the trash. ‘I said, I am throwing away these papers.’ He says it like it isn’t everything he’s worked on every morning, afternoon, and evening of the past 3 years. ‘Why?’ I whisper as he ties the bag closed and walks towards the door. ‘Because they’re useless, like me.’ And with that he opens the door and walks out, bag in one hand, bottle in the other. I stand there, frozen. I don’t even know if I’m breathing because breathing doesn’t seem to matter. I can feel something inside of me bubbling up like someone dropped me and still tried to crack me open. I explode. ‘God fucking dammit.’ I yell, shoving the table so hard it flips on it’s side with a loud bang, everything on it spills and shatters on the ground. I kick it with my bare foot hard enough to crack one of my toes. I wish I had the kind of anger that made me invincible but I am overly aware of how weak I am when I’m angry. ‘Fuck.’ I mutter to myself, rubbing my foot as the two dogs run inside, sniffing around the glass and spilt coffee. I am the adult here, left to clean up the messes, alone, like always. I slam the door first, hard- for emphasis, but I doubt my husband has stuck around close enough to hear. I don’t know where he goes when he gets in a dark place, I’ve learned to let him figure it out himself. I tried helping once and it ended with me screaming angry words and him sitting in silence until he slowly walked out the door, got into his car and drove it into a tree. After that day I let him figure it out on his own. After I’ve cleaned everything up I make myself another pot of coffee and pour three shots of bourbon. I take it back to our bedroom and sit on the mattress we call a bed. I try not to cry but I do anyways.  
My husband is an inventor. Except he hasn’t been for the past two months. We don’t sit on the roof anymore. The house doesn’t constantly have music running through it. It’s too quiet. The floor creaks and the house moans and that seems like too much life for us now. I don’t know what caused my husband to break and throw everything he cared about away. I secretly went and pulled it all out of the garbage and threw everything into my trunk. I was sure one day he would need it, but now, two months later I’ve started having doubts that he would. His longest stretch without a new idea lasted a week. I had never been more relieved to wake up at 3 am to the sounds of him brewing his strongest pot of coffee and explaining his ideas to the dogs. Now it’s been two months. He makes me coffee in the mornings before I go to work, and when I come home dinner is sitting on the table. He never smiles or tells me anything new. We just sit in silence. I asked him once when he was going to try something new and he had shrugged and said, ‘probably never.’ I snapped and said maybe he should get a real job then. He had almost smiled then, the kind of smile like he had known what I was going to say and he was telling himself, I told you so. He left that night and came back two nights later smelling like booze and someone else’s perfume. His best friend had carried him inside and thrown him on the couch, grimacing. My husband has one friend to call his own. I think that’s all he could ever want really, one friend who truly understands his mind and how it ticks. I spent most of the night talking to his friend, telling him how I was walking on eggshells around my own husband. He looked sad but nodded and told me to give it time. He wouldn’t tell me where he found my husband, wouldn’t look me in the eye. My husband and I never talked about where he had been or what he had done. I wanted to, but I was too tired to fight about it.  
My husband used to be an inventor. It’s been a year now since he threw away all his ideas. 3 months since I threw them out of my trunk and set them on fire. My fingertips still have little scars from where I let them sit too close to the fire for too long. My husband didn’t kiss the ends of each one like he used to. I don’t usually go home anymore. The silence became too much to handle and I began to hear my own thoughts. My husband’s friend came by today to tell me that my husband had moved in with him. ‘Oh’ I said, mostly to myself. I’m not sure why I wasn’t surprised. I guess I knew my husband well. I knew he was going to leave. ‘He just wants to give you some space while he tries to figure some stuff out.’ I wanted to hit his friend. I wanted to punch him so hard in the face that something cracked or broke-so that he would feel how my heart felt. But I didn’t. I was too tired to. Maybe I was relieved my husband was gone for a while. I felt like my breath was always caught in my chest now. ‘I understand, take care of him.’ And that was all i said before I stood up and saw myself out of my own house.  
My husband was an inventor. But he isn’t one anymore. He is barely my husband now. I haven’t seen him in weeks. I saw him at a bar once but I didn’t have the heart to look and see if he was alone. I couldn’t stand the thought. I took the dogs to his friends house today and left them there because I couldn’t stand their sad faces looking at me anymore. They always loved my husband more than me. I drove my car from his friend’s house into a river. I thought maybe the impact would kill me but it didn’t and I was too afraid of drowning to stay inside the car. I was always weak. That’s what I told the fireman who was wrapping me into a blanket and holding me close. He looked shocked, concerned, but I couldn’t figure out why. I spent two months in a mental institution. My husband tried to come and see me but I told him I couldn’t let him look at me. Not when I was so tired and weak and couldn’t take care of him like he needed me to.  
I was surprised it was my husband taking me home from the hospital. He had both the dogs in the backseat. He smiled when he saw me, the smile that made his eyes turn into little slits. The smile I had missed so much for the past year. I couldn’t help but smile back at him. ‘Hi’ is all he said, pulling me into a hug. I buried my face in his chest and breathed in. He smelled like coffee and pine. ‘Hi’ I responded, pulling back and walking to get into the car. We drove home in silence but it was nice. The dogs were panting and whining behind me, licking my ears whenever they could. I was frightened to go home and see all the spiderwebs and ruined food in the fridge. It would be grey and dirty and empty I had decided. But it wasn’t. My husband opened the door for me, letting out the soft smells of fresh brewed coffee and bread. There was a tall candle sitting on the table, flickering in the breeze. On the table were piles and piles of new drawings and sketches full of colors and vivid descriptions. I smiled, pulling myself up onto the counter and pulling a cup out of the cupboard. ‘Which one is the best?’ I asked, pouring the coffee into the cup. My husband slyly looked at me. He looked good in the light, not ashy or grey like he had looked for months but golden. His eyes were shining. ‘I only have one’ He pours milk into my coffee and leans on the counter beside me. ‘Oh?’ I ask, surprised. The last 3 years have been fully of many, many ideas but never just one at one time. Never one with this much content and dedication. ‘We….’ he trails of for emphasis. I can feel my heart speed up and he stares into my eyes. ‘Are going to go live in the sky.’ And then he started laughing like he was so happy his soul couldn’t contain it. So I laughed too.


	2. chapter 2

It had been almost a year since we had lived in a cloud and I still couldn’t figure out how the others had discovered all of our plans. We could see them from our cloud. They had built a city on the cloud almost exactly like the ones sitting snugly on the planet. I brought it up to my husband once that it completely defeated the purpose of leaving. He had looked surprised that I felt so strongly about it and simply said, ‘Who are we to judge what others need.’ I didn’t say anything after that. I thought he would be mad that someone had stolen his idea, his experiment, his invention. Instead he smiled and looked pleased, he was “glad others were following in our footsteps” I was always a selfish person. I wanted this to be ours and ours alone. When we had first lived on the clouds, it was us and us alone. Nothing else mattered. Now there was a whole new city beside us. I could always see it from the rooftop where we sat at night. It followed up no matter where we were, pushing closer and closer into our bubble. It was almost a year to the day since we arrived on the cloud that we decided to visit the other cloud. I hadn’t wanted to. If we wanted to see other people why wouldn’t we go back to the planet and see the people we already knew and loved? My husband insisted that he wanted to check out their fields and life forces to make sure everything was alright. I wanted them all to fail and fall to the ground. My husband told me I was a cold person for saying that. Maybe he was right. I didn’t want him to go alone, so I went.  
When we arrived at the other cloud everything was loud and dark. They had laid down cobble streets with large, gray buildings. It was very unlike our own bright cloud that was full of space and life. This felt suffocating as it loomed over us. I held his hand tightly, the noise was louder than what I was used to and the people were pressed up on each other. My husband insisted there weren't that many people on the cloud because the cloud simply couldn’t hold the weight. I pointed at the large buildings and he had shrugged like he wasn’t the one who invented the machine that made everything solid enough to sit on the cloud. He left me in a bar, wandering off to check on something or another. He always murmured so that I couldn’t understand him even if I wanted to. A kind looking man that couldn’t have been older than twenty five poured me a drink and told me it was free and laughed as though he had told me a very good joke. I looked at him quizzically. ‘You’re not from around here, are you love?’ he asked. I shook my head. ‘Everything is free here, it’s just not free to get here.’ I nodded as I shoved the drink straw, pretending to be entranced by it to end the forced conversation. The place was packed with loud music and the happiest looking people. They were like a river, flowing constantly around each other, always in motion, always moving. I suppose living on a cloud makes people close. I was not used to being close.   
It had been three drinks later, my hands were fuzzy along with my face and I thought my husband would have returned by now. He knew I was frightened of being alone and loud noises so it angered me that he would so carelessly left me for so long. He never liked leaving me on our cloud alone in case something failed and I fell to my death. I once told him I trusted his knowledge with my life. His face had darkened and gripped my hand so tightly it turned my fingers red. ‘Never trust anything with your life, it will always fail you.’ He stood up, rubbing the large scar I had sustained from trying to kill myself. I forced a smile and said, ‘Of course.’ and watched him leave. Everything was louder and darker and I found myself leaving the bar with only half of my mind thinking about it. It was as though my legs had grown tired of waiting for my brain to tell it what to do and had left on its own accord. The slightly fresh air was nice. The bubble of air that kept the temperature and oxygen levels livable always kept scents. It smelled of gas and people and alcohol. It was cool enough that I felt the rush of it go straight to my cheeks. For a second I thought about walking straight out of the bubble and off the side of the cloud. I had these thoughts often even in our own cloud. They were always nestled in the back of my brain, like a compulsion. Some nights I would look off the roof and wonder what it would feel like to simply step off and let myself drop out of the heavens. I never told my husband about any of these thoughts. I step back from the side of the large cloud and look around for my husband. I find that he was of course right and there really wasn’t all that many people on the cloud. They walked around in small groups, entering and exiting bars and strip clubs and drug stores. None of them paid attention to me and I was quite pleased about that. My legs wobbled beneath me, growing tired of standing in one place and an arm encircled mine. “You alright love?’ it was the bar tender that had poured all my drinks. He looked different out in the bright light of the moon. He frowned after a moment of silence and said, ‘I thought maybe you’d need a hand.’ I realized I had been looking into his eyes for far too long. I swallowed, ‘I”m looking for my husband.’ After the words left my mouth I cringed at them. They sounded so whiney. That was something I always hated about myself. I had always wanted to be someone who was strong and didn’t need others. But I always needed help, always complaining to anyone who would listen about how weak I was. The bartender’s eyebrows grew together but he nodded, ‘Where did your husband go? We aren’t too big to lose anyone that well.’ I smiled at the joke more out of convenience than actual humor. I didn’t want to tell him who my husband was so I thanked him for the concern. His arm was still around my waist. He was warm and solid and I excused myself and moved down the small street. Everything was illuminated by the white light of the moon. I walked down a small alley that connected the two largest streets. I had discovered how these people had figured out my husband’s invention on their own. I discovered why my husband was not angered by the fact that someone had stolen his work. He had given someone his work willingly and that person was being held in his arms as they deeply kissed, pushed up against the brick wall of the alley.  
I watched them, unable to pull away. I wanted to see what they would continue to do without knowing I was there. My hands were instantly clammy, my nails digging into the meaty flesh of the insides. I knew there would be blood in my clinched fist. My husband always told me that I cared too much about things, but that he wasn’t sure if I actually had emotions at all. I was contemplating this as I watched them roam about each other’s bodies. If I were someone else wouldn’t I have stopped them already? If I cared so deeply about everything, wouldn’t I have immediately ran down the alley, screaming and raging. Instead I stood, peering around the corner, feeling as though my heart was being squeezed in between my tightened fists. She was beautiful, I was sure of that. Her long brown hair was in between my husband’s fingers like they belonged there. ‘Alexander.’ she murmured and he pulled back, looking into her face with a look that he used to give to me, long ago, before the incidents. I was trapped in between wanting to beat the shit out of her or calmly walking to the side of the cloud and stepping over. I wondered if her perfume smelled like the same one he used to come home with rubbed into his skin.


End file.
